Of course Jeff, LeBron and Arianna have an undying hustle. But hard work alone is just your ticket to the dance — you’ve still got to get the girl.

And each of these three built their empires through a collection of personal mentors and coaches. In fact, their first comment whenever receiving praise is to give gratitude towards those that helped them along the way. But many people have coaches / mentors — this doesn’t guarantee success.

Lastly, following your passion is horrible advice. Jeff, LeBron and Arianna have a constant yearning to be the best in their field — but so do all of their competitors.
So if it’s not 24/7/365 hustle, personal coaches or passion, what is it?

The (Not-So-Sexy) Secret to Success

What ties Jeff, LeBron and Arianna together in their success is bland and boring — but absolutely essential.

The common element between them is the age-old (often ignored) advice of getting a good night’s rest. That’s right, all three of them prioritize sleep, especially when their best performance is required.

In today’s post I’ve invited my friend, Eric Conley, to debunk the fallacy of high-profile CEOs and athletes burning the ‘midnight oil’ to get ahead. He’ll dig into the habits of Jeff, LeBron and Arianna and how they propelled their careers to achieve true mastery. And perhaps most importantly, he will teach you the secret to unlocking your hidden potential (note, it’s not simply getting enough sleep).

Eric — take it away.

Cutting Sleep May Bring Success, but at a Cost

Ranjan Das is by all accounts an overachiever.

As the CEO and Managing Director of SAP for the India Subcontinent he led all the market-facing functions. His responsibilities included crafting the go-to-market strategy, driving customer satisfaction and managing the profit and loss for all revenue-generating functions[1].

His relentless work ethic provided him the reputation of driving SAP India’s business ahead of its rivals in the country[2].

In addition to his success at work, Ranjan was a health freak — he ate perfectly, worked out daily and ran marathons to satisfy his competitive spirit. His ambition to succeed trumped everything. He even refrained from bad habits like drinking and smoking with little bongs.

So why is it, at the ripe age of 42 Ranjan died from massive cardiac arrest?

The 4-Hour Sleep Myth

In today’s culture a lack of sleep is a form of braggery. We often associate sleep deprivation with success or superhuman abilities.

Candidly, I used to be in awe of people who are uber successful who claim to get by on 4-5 hours of sleep.

But stories like Ranjan’s are becoming more and more frequent.

If you haven’t guessed already, Ranjan’s death is cited towards his sleep (or lack thereof) habits.

He boasted he “only needed 4 hours of sleep”. Sadly, his position on sleep became a vicious downward spiral — each time he was quoted on his late night routine he was applauded from peers and rewarded with continued success, eventually becoming a leader in the juggernaut company that is SAP.

To Ranjan, the fallacy of less sleep equaling success led to an early death, despite his reputation of being a “health freak”.

What’s unfortunate for Ranjan is that the consequences of sleep deprivation (including his death) were overshadowed by the lifelong societal and career praise he received.

Keep this in mind the next time you overhear a co-worker boast that “she was up all night” to complete a project. Her decision to do so caused WAY more harm than good.

How Jeff Bezos, LeBron James and Arianna Huffington Use Sleep to Catapult their Success

Jeff Bezos

Amazon.com rivals Wal-Mart as a store, Apple as a device maker, and IBM as a data services provider. Founded just 20 years ago and with revenue expected to hit $90 billion this year, Jeff Bezos is the posterboy for self-made success[3].

Yet night after night he dedicates 8 hours towards sleep.

This is quite admirable, considering the ruthless pursuit by Bezos into making Amazon an e-commerce powerhouse.

“I’m more alert and I think more clearly” as a result, Mr. Bezos says. “I just feel so much better all day long if I’ve had eight hours.”[4]

The key lesson here is to prioritize clarity and focus to achieve your best work over being fatigued, but busy, with directionless tasks.

LeBron James

And when athletes combine sleep with nutrition and exercise their results skyrocket.

Consider the following:

Tennis players get a 42% boost in hitting accuracy

Sleep improves split-second decision making ability by 4.3%

Football players drop 0.1 off their 40-yard dash times by sleeping more

And most impressive, a 20-30 minute power nap improves alertness by 100%[5].

The advantages received from increased sleep can be the difference maker for professional athletes.

At just 30 year’s old, LeBron is in his 12th NBA season and has accumulated 34,332 career regular season minutes (14 among all active players)[6]. Sleep — perhaps more than anything else — is the reason he is able to perform at an MVP level everytime he steps on the basketball court.

Arianna Huffington

As the President and Editor-in-Chief of Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington leads a busy life.

So much so that in 2007, Arianna passed out from sheer exhaustion. She broke her cheekbone on her desk and got five stitches under her right eye[7].

In her speech, she negates the boasting, one-manupship of sleep deprivation stating:

“..f you try to make a breakfast date, and you say, “How about eight o’clock?” they’re likely to tell you, “Eight o’clock is too late for me, but that’s okay, I can get a game of tennis in and do a few conference calls and meet you at eight.” And they think that means that they are so incredibly busy and productive, but the truth is they’re not, because we, at the moment, have had brilliant leaders in business, in finance, in politics making terrible decisions. So a high I.Q. does not mean that you’re a good leader, because the essence of leadership is being able to see the iceberg before it hits the Titanic. Ad we’ve had far too many icebergs hitting our Titanics.”

Huffington admits that by making sleep a priority she’s had to say “no” to good opportunities — but the benefit of doing so is profound.

Unlike her former zombie-self, she is able to focus on the critical business decisions she makes at HuffPo AND have energy for family time and playing with her kids.

In her own words, “As I got more rest, I could work and come home — and become the human jungle gym again”[8].

If Arianna, one of Forbes most influential women for 2014, allows adequate sleep in her life, couldn’t you?

How Sleep Unleashes Your Inner Genius

I recently went on a week-long trip back home to Ohio. While staying there, my little sister was kind enough to let my fiance and I sleep in her full-size bed — a little snug, but much better than the couch.

And let me tell you, I went WAY beyond my normal sleep routine. Night-after-night I slept for at least 10 hours and woke up whenever I wanted to.

My body quickly adapted with the late to sleep / late to rise routine almost overnight. What’s odd is that I found myself tired in the afternoon — even though I slept in.

Not only did I have less energy during this interim period, but I also shortened my days:

Normal Routine

Rise n’ Shine: 5 AM

Bedtime: 10 PM

Total Waking Hours: 17

Ohio Routine

Rise n’ Shine: 9 AM

Bedtime: 11 PM

Total Waking Hours: 14

Did I miss my alarm clock while in Ohio? Absolutely not.

And I didn’t go back home to be productive — I came to relax and enjoy time with my family.

But during this time I realized just how valuable my *normal* routine is. I make sleep a priority and turn off all electronics, including my work iPhone, by 9 PM — no excuses.
To the contrary, when I was in Ohio I stayed up late to watch movies that I’d already seen multiple times.

This reminds me of the advice I found on Reddit:

“If you wouldn’t wake up early to do it, you probably shouldn’t stay up late to do it.”
The moral of the story: It’s 100% acceptable (and encouraged) to stay up late every once in a while. But if you continually watch late night TV or have your eyes glued to your iPad you need to ask yourself, “Would I wake up to catch the next episode of The Walking Dead or scroll through Kim Kardashian’s latest Instagram pictures?

And although the intent behind this question is to keep you mindful of your priorities (i.e. sleep) we know that knowledge without action is useless.

With that, I’ll share with you my personal, advanced Stop and Snooze Routine to ensure you wake up with creative energy to complete your life’s work.

Stop and Snooze Routine

The Stop and Snooze routine begins with a simple, but profound idea — an evening alarm on your alarm clock.

You are probably using your alarm clock to wake you up in the morning, but you haven’t considered using your alarm to help you get to sleep.

Setting up your evening alarm is easy — just work backwards from the time you wake up.
For example, if you want to have seven hours of sleep (recommended minimum) and need to be awake by 6 AM, then you’d need to fall asleep by 11 PM the night before. To be asleep by 11 PM, you’ll need to set your evening alarm to 10 PM to trigger your Stop and Snooze Routine an hour before sleep.

A Day in the Life

Ninety percent of the time, I’m asleep by 10 PM during the week. I get at least seven hours of sleep before I wake up at 5 AM for CrossFit.

To help me get to sleep by 10 PM, I have my evening alarm clock prompt me to begin my nightly routine at 9 PM:

Pack gym bag with office clothes

Set workout clothes and shoes out in the living room

Have boiled eggs (peeled), oatmeal with blueberries and a protein shake ready in the fridge

Drink Sleepy Time tea

Read until I fall asleep

As mundane as this routine might seem, I get excited anticipating my 9 PM alarm. Even if I’m working on my laptop, I know that when 9 PM comes around, it’ll be time to quit. The rest of the evening is “my time,” and I get to cap it off with reading — something I always claimed to “never have time for.”

And when my 5 AM alarm goes off, I’m out of my bed and out the door in less than 15 minutes because I had set everything up for myself, leaving me with zero excuses to miss a workout.

What’s more is that when I workout in the morning I virtually guarantee myself to have a great day. I’ve been compiling notes in my Five-Minute Journal for months and there is a definite correlation between CrossFit in the morning and increased productivity / happiness for the day.

Action Steps

Determine what time you want to wake up in the morning. Count backwards the number of hours you wish to sleep plus one and set your alarm (i.e. wake up at 5 AM while getting 7 hours of sleep requires a 10 PM snooze time and 9 PM evening alarm).

When your evening alarm (i.e. 9 PM) goes off, begin taking care of all the items you would normally put off till morning and get them done now. This includes picking out your clothes for tomorrow and setting out your breakfast items (dishes and preparing your food) and shouldn’t take longer than 15 minutes. Even as someone who preaches good sleep habits, I’m never motivated first thing in the morning. Why fight against yourself in the morning when you can get your morning tasks out of the way at night?

After spending 15 minutes getting your things ready for the morning, it is now “your” time. Enjoy it reading, meditating, taking a warm shower, talking to your spouse — whatever! This is your guilt-free time, and you can choose to do whatever you like, just make sure the lights are out by 10 PM (or whatever time allows you to get the hours of sleep you need).

How YOU Can Fall Asleep in Minutes

We’ve seen how poor sleep habits (allegedly) brought a high-profile CEO to an early death, even though he was considered a “health freak.” Unfortunately, this story will be forgotten. The culture we live in praises sleep and believes it is required to get to the next level.

Luckily we have three of the most influential people on the planet to model after — Jeff Bezos, LeBron James and Arianna Huffington. All three of them sleep MORE than the average person and attribute their success to a good night’s rest.

It’s time to stop making excuses. Let’s use sleep to launch our own success and get started right away by using my advanced Stop and Snooze Routine.

Great info in your article . I like the part where you debunked the ” 4-Hour Sleep Myth”. I tried that and literally fell flat on my face after few months. Since that I threw my alarm clock out of the window. Then I adjusted my wake up time just by getting to bed earlier and surrendering my conscious mind to my big sleepy giant – the subconscious mind. As a matter of fact, I go to bed a 9pm and wake up between 5am and 6am. What I found was remarkable: My wake up time varies only by 30 min every day. It feels great to live without an alarm clock. My only rule: Once I wake up, I get up!

Also great ideas in your and free 32-page eBook, thanks for putting it altogether.

Sure. The first hour, I read 20 pages. The second hour I write 4 pages. The hour before I go to bed I read another 20 pages. I do this every day, So in one week, I read around 280 pages and write 28 pages. That’s a book a week read and a book every two month written 😉

Great post, Eric. It would be great, though, if you actually posted some info about falling asleep in minutes (since this is the title of the post) rather than just a link to the ebook. Just saying. 😛

I completely agree with what you wrote – surviving on 4 hours of sleep per night is a recipe for an untimely death, not a path a successful and fulfilling life. It’s a shame that our society rewards this type of mindless self-destruction.

Ultimately, you can get enough sleep, time with your family, reading time, hobby time, and still complete all work by 5-6 p.m. Don’t know if you’ve heard of Cal Newport (calnewport.com), but he’s mastered this.

The dude wrote a book and a PhD thesis all at the same time in the space of a year (I hope I’m remembering it right) without ever working past 6 p.m., or something crazy like that. Just goes to show that solid habits and good systems trump workaholism every time.

Personally, I feel best after 9 hours of sleep. So no matter when I go to sleep, at 10 p.m. or at 4 a.m., I get 9 hours. To fall asleep faster, I use software that filters out blue light from my monitor after sundown, read fiction in bed and do a simple breathing meditation if my mind is too agitated to sleep. So far it works perfectly.

But I am taking steps to become more of a morning person – getting up at noon can get a bit ridiculous. 🙂

Eric, love this post. I’ve been a long-time believer in 8 hours of sleep (and not much more than that, otherwise I just go groggy).

I’ve been having some challenges in shifting my daily routine to earlier hours — I’ve had success with waking up at 5am to write (currently working on my first book). I have a great evening routine that I’ve had for years now, but it’s been hard to shift it to an earlier time. The biggest challenge for me has been to disconnect from all devices, so I love your “no excuses” policy. As you said — knowledge without action == no results, so even though I’ve heard the “alarm to sleep” idea, I haven’t actually tried it yet — setting it RIGHT NOW.

Just signed up for your list — though FYI, the opt-in box was no visible from mobile.

Hey Shiri — Agreed with you 100% on the grogginess over 8 hours. I’m the same way (but some people love 8+ hours!).

Have you thought of using http://www.stickk.com/ to place a bet with yourself on your bedtime? I talk about StickK in my e-book and I’ve personally used it to give up alcohol for extended periods of time.

Hi Eric. Great piece, and I’m with you all the way. I’m already applying different changes in my life to get the benefit of earlier mornings AND more sleep.

One thing in your post gets me wondering though. You write how Ariana Huffington crashed on her keyboard in 2007, after which she started to get more sleep. At this point she already reached momentum in her great success story. This means she did work herself to exhaustion to get that momentum, suggesting she could get more sleep only because she was already on the fast track with her business.

Again, I’m with you all the way on this, but I think it’s an impression most people have; you don’t have time to sleep until you’re already successful.

Hey Vincento — I’m really happy you made the comment on Arianna. It’s easy to allow time for more sleep once you’ve hit success.

However, I bet if you asked Arianna if she could’ve leveraged her energy better (versus time) she would’ve said “yes”.

That’s the focus here. You can have your cake and eat it too with sleep and success. It’s about expending your energy wisely and working on the critical items of your business, versus merely being “busy”.

Nice post. I also pay attention to sleep at least 7 hours for about 3 months now. When I started I saw the difference immediately. I’m able to work on my side business before work, performed better at work and then exercise and spend nice time with my family in the afternoon and evening. I want to wake up about 5:30 so I now I have to go to bed around 10PM. I also prepare everything I can in the evening so in the morning I have free time for daily routine and work at home for myself when the family is still in bed. I follow it also during the weekends when I can enjoy even much time without full-time job.

I also highly recommend meditation for learning how to control your thoughts and how to calm down before sleep so you can fall asleep much quicker. I use Headspace for medidation. They have also “sleep” pack to learn new things and ideas about sleeping and also a on-the-go session for falling asleep while listening to it. Since I meditate I’m also more calm, focused during the day and I better enjoy the family time not thinking about other things.

Now I face a though challenge with the sleeping since my son was born a week ago. First daughter and the son are disrupting me so I can’t get a full duration of sleep. I will have to figure out something new but probably more length will do it. If you have any recommendations I’d love to hear. Cheers.

I wake up at 5 AM (or a little earlier) to either do CrossFit or work on my side project before work. And on the weekends, I’m usually up at 7 AM reading or writing while my fiancee sleeps in.

I also use Headspace for meditation. Admittedly, I find it uber difficult to do in the morning so I’m definitely going to check out the “sleep” pack you mention.

And finally, congratulations on the birth of your son! I personally can’t wait to be a father. My advice to getting enough sleep is to master cat naps (Chris Yeh does this — he’ll sneak in 10 minutes here and there to help aid his energy) and try to stick to an evening routine with your family.

– Power – Rest up to 20 minutes, Power Nap will wake you up just before you fall into deep sleep
– Recovery – Rest up to 45 minutes and get an energy boost!
– 1 sleep cycle – Power Nap lets you sleep for one full sleep-cycle, and will wake you up in your light sleep phase

The app costs $1.99 and is worth the small investment.

Also, as a rule of thumb I try to never nap within 5 or 6 hours of my bedtime as it’ll interrupt my circadian rhythm.

I’ve heard that it’s essential to get rid of electronic devices in room for better sleep. I don’t like the idea of sleeping with the phone under my pad. Right now I have the phone on the floor used as alarm. But I can give some app a try. Maybe turning off all connections (or flight mode) on the phone during the night could ease my negative stand for these apps.

Definitely put your phone on airplane mode. If you prefer not to use your phone at all, you can always use another alarm (i.e. When I nap on the couch, I set the kitchen stove timer for 20 minutes to catch a quick nap. This forces me to get up and shut off the timer because it’s in another room.)

Great post! I find myself in regular ‘debates’ about the topic of sleep. Pretty much it goes like this…
‘I need to work every hour or I won’t be successful, I know I’m shattered but it’s what entrepreneurs need to do and people are watching so I need to put in a 12hr shift’…
Me: ‘Why are you wearing your lack of sleep like a badge of honour. There is no point in working 12hours if you are only productive for less than half of that. It’s not big and it’s not clever and you look awful!’
OK, I don’t tell them they look awful, but it’s as if they want to be known as the person that can’t sleep and put in more hours than everyone else rather than the person that worked out ‘how’ they could get more sleep.
It’s all in a mindset and whether you choose to change it.
I on the other hand enjoy my 8 hours sleep each night after burning out years ago and learning the hard way. Loved the case studies!